Guy Kewney

It turns out that people are really scared of having a plane land on their homes. No, nothing to do with terrorism. This is a scare caused by the decision to move into the wireless millennium and build sky-hooks to hold the antennae up above us. The project you want to watch, over the next four years, is Capanina.

It's starting with a pilot project using a balloon, and is going to move on to a series of planes flying permanently in circles in the stratosphere (at 60,000ft plus) for six months at a time.

The problems facing providers of broadband are speed and availability. I can reach you at 14.4Kbps anywhere in the UK if you have a cell phone. I can communicate with you at 100Mbps if you are in reach of some sort of metro Ethernet circuit and are wealthy.

And, if you live in Tokyo, you can get a three-month free trial install of local broadband, 100Mbps again, from Yahoo Japan, and pay $20 a month if you want to keep it after that trial. Which I think illustrates rather well the fact that the real problem facing them is how to scam cash off customers.

There are, however, dozens of ways of getting 100Mbps to a customer. If you have optical fibre running into your building, 100Mbps is a doddle, but most of us don't.

Theoretically, you can get 54Mbps over Wi-fi, hence the growth of Locustworld Meshbox colonies of people all sharing a satellite or E1 link and using 2.45GHz radios to send data around their neighbourhoods.

And Intel is leading a new generation of wireless based on the Wimax technology, which pretty much does the same thing as Wi-fi, but is controlled by an authority, not by the public.

But the issue that matters isn't really what frequency of wireless is used, or whether it's stuck in a plane circling at 60,000ft, or whizzing around in space on a low-earth orbit satellite, or floating serenely in geostationary orbit. What matters is who controls it.

Take the 'street lamp' project. It's science fiction come true in its aims: cars driving themselves down the road with the 'driver' asleep in the back. But it's not far in the future: the Highways Agency has asked for bids to provide a roadside telemetry and telematics network.

It is, in theory, capable of being the infrastructure needed to automate car driving. Initially, it will feed data to the human drivers, but once that's in place there's no denying that a computer could probably do the job just as well.

But the network of lamp posts and signposts (they all have electricity!) is the closest thing we have to a ubiquitous data highway. It goes everywhere, and if every one of those items of street furniture has the internet on it, then you have the basis of a revolution.

Technology provided by a startup, Last Mile Communications, means the lamp posts can talk to each other, as well as to a wired internet feed in each area they run.

It would be simple to add Wi-fi nodes to the 63GHz transceivers which the government is authorising. And control of those local nodes could be defined locally - for example, a shop or restaurant could have its own node.

Skylinc is putting the balloon up. A balloon, or 'tethered aerostat' would hang below most air traffic and provide broadband at ADSL speeds to a pretty wide area, say 50 miles or so across.

Trials of that start this spring, as part of Capanina. It wouldn't be locally controlled house-by-house; an authority would manage it.

But the High Altitude Platform (HAP), the stratospheric dirigible or solar-powered plane, would cover a wider area with much faster data.

Capanina expects to find a way of using steerable antennae. A 'microcell' of about four miles across would have enough bandwidth to give every user in that area speeds of 50Mbps or more, and the ability to move from one cell to the next, but it would not be locally controlled.

That seems to be the key question at the moment: who controls it? Some businesses are raising finance on the grounds that they 'own' the wireless footprint of Wi-fi services in crucial areas, like hotels, shopping malls, leisure centres and railway stations.

This is nonsense; Wi-fi is licence-exempt, and nobody except a military establishment or an airport has any legal way of enforcing an exclusion zone. You may own the railway station, but you can't legally stop the cafe over the road from running a hot spot!

The crunch is cost. A street full of people, all owning their own Meshbox and linked together, can provide each other with shared access to the internet at a reasonable speed (500Kbps or so each) for pennies a month.

Keeping a HAP aircraft up, or launching a satellite, or maintaining a network of lamp posts has to be the same cost as that per bit, or there is no point to it.

The plane, of course, doesn't have to circle overhead. In fact, says David Grace at York University, the whole of the UK could be covered by planes flying over the sea.

I'd feel a bit safer if it was directly overhead; one of the hardest things to do is to make a plane dive vertically down.

And I'll be far more excited about what community action can achieve than any amount of high-tech engineering overhead.

Capanina Stratospheric Broadband

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